To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drif...t across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Sam Spade: You, eh, you aren't exactly the sort of a person you pretend to be, are you?Brigid O'Shaughnessy: Why, I'm not su...re I know exactly what you mean.Spade: The schoolgirl manner. You know, blushing, stammering, and all that.Brigid: I haven't lived a good life. I've been bad. Worse than you can know.Spade: Yeah, well that's good. Because if you actually were as innocent as you pretend to be, we'd never get anywhere.Brigid: I won't be innocent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradi...ctory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies--and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--...in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »